The Place Between Years
Winter light, not knowing, and notes from the compost pile
On Monday morning, I woke before it was light, I’m usually like a bear in the winter and prefer to stay in bed as long as possible. Instead, this morning I carried my body to the sofa, made a pot of tea, and lay there in the dark watching the light slowly find its way through the trees that mark the boundary of our garden.
It wasn’t a sunrise exactly. More a faint pink presence, thin and tentative, filtering into the room. Winter light doesn’t arrive with a fanfare. It seeps. It stains the edges of things. It changes the world quietly.
I lay there a long time, noticing how gradually the garden became visible. How slowly the day began, like the darkness didn’t want to let go.
January often feels like that to me.
Held in the in-between space, not a beginning, not an ending. The pause between the inhale and the exhale. A month that belongs to the void.
And yet culturally, January is so rarely allowed to be this. We usher it in as if it were a clean page. A reset. A bright, declarative moment. We speak of “fresh starts” while the living world is still deep in its inward season. Trees are holding tight to their reserves. Seeds sealed in the darkness. Bodies asking for warmth, density, slowness.
I tend to give the clarifying, orienting, organising energy of January a wide berth. Past me has been known to become overly captivated by the shiny-ness of planning and the promise of a blank January calendar. My pattern-loving brain wants to make maps. It wants to gather the possibilities and line them up like dominoes. To turn dreaming into structure. Feeling into plans. Uncertainty into direction.
And quickly, I find myself flooded with overwhelm.
Overwhelmed not only by lists and what-if’s, but by how fast this sense-making pulls me away from my own centre. From my breath. From sensation. From the inner whispers that don’t need to be shaped into goals.
So instead, for the most part, I’ve learned to practice something else.
When I stay with the quiet, slow essence of this month, I notice how little of me actually wants to be “out” right now. How instinctively my system moves like a soft-bodied underground animal. I’m calling this ‘Mole-energy’. Scurrying out only for what’s necessary, then scurrying back again into my nest. Back into the dark. Back into the warm, unformed places where nothing is being asked to become anything yet.
There’s a rightness to ‘slow’ that my body understands much more.
January is a liminal space. And liminal spaces rarely respond well to being forced and pushed.
So much of what’s alive here is happening under the surface. Old shapes are loosening. Certainties thinning. Energies redistributing themselves in ways that don’t yet have language. Things are breaking down without anything new to replace them. It can feel a lot like stagnation. Or wrongness. Or like we’ve lost momentum and need to get it back.
Perhaps this is why we habitually force ourselves into action and newness when the rest of the natural world still sleeps.Because being in the place of not knowing can be so confronting.
Life in this season doesn’t move by pushing forward, but by breaking down and rearranging itself in the dark.
This is how winter works.
This is how compost works.
This is how bodies often work too.
Change often doesn’t arrive like the flicking of a switch. Many times it begins as a slow disintegration. The soft collapse of forms that once made sense. Matter being broken down into something that will one day nourish life, but for now is simply… breaking down.
This is a darker place than we’re usually encouraged to stay with. It smells of endings. Of rot. Of things no longer useful in the way they once were. It’s not tidy and it doesn’t perform progress.
And yet it’s profoundly alive.
Nothing is blooming, but everything is busy. Clarifying, orienting and organising are happening, but it doesn’t look like the pretty progress we’re marketed.
Less ‘fresh start’ and more steaming compost heap, heat building in the dark, unseen work underway, life quietly being made from what’s breaking down.
So I’m allowing myself more time in this fertile holding space. Where I’m less interested in answers. Less compelled by figuring out. More drawn to being than doing.
I’m practising staying with what’s still becoming soil. With tending to the terrain the new year will steadily grow in.
This is my quiet hello, after a longer pause than I expected. From the thin winter light and the compost heap. From the edge of years. If you’re here too, in any version of the in-between I’m waving to you through the dappled winter light.
With love
Sara xx
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